23 Dec
2007
23 Dec
'07
7:42 p.m.
Ensor wrote:
VESA was the bane
of my life - all it achieved was to make things significantly MORE
complicated. And those TSRs which allegedly turned non-VESA compliant
cards into VESA compliant cards were, in most cases, enough to drive you
to the point of slashing your wrists.... :-(
I had no issues at all working with VESA. It made my life easier
because I didn't have to support 30+ different chipset variants. If you
queried the BIOS for the card's capabilities and stayed within them, it
didn't give you problems.
I'm quite surprised you claim to have jad trouble with VESA. I found
stock VGA 640x480 at 16 more troublesome because of the bitplane nature of
the mode. VESA 1.x let me plot a pixel with one byte write... doesn't
get much easier than that.
Nowadays, VESA would certainly be worth investigating
since all this
stuff is obsolete and available at little or no cost.
Actually, thanks to the popularity of Linux, VESA is put into every ATI
and nVidia card still being made. Run VESAINFO on your modern card if
you don't believe me -- it will work and the extensive list of modes
available may surprise you.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/